Thomas Powers:Secrets of the Plains Indians

The Forever War

by Tim Judah

Whats Inside the Bombs?

by Annie Sparrow

JESSICAMATHEWS:

EINSTEINPOUNDSAPPHOFrancine Prose on Toni Morrison

Anthony Grafton: A Mysterious Genius

David Cole: Religious vs.Gay Freedom

May 7, 2015 / Volume LXII, Number 8

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3Alex Traub, Editorial Assistant; Andrew Katzenstein, Editorial Intern; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher; Borden Elniff and Katie Jefferis, Type Production; Janet Noble, Cover Production; Kazue Soma Jensen, Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Michael King, Technical Director & Advertising Sales Manager; Madeline Hester, Classied Advertising; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice Fellegara, Director of Marketing and Plan-ning; Andrea Moore, Assistant Circulation Manager; Matthew Howard, Director of Electronic Publishing; Angela Hederman, Special Projects; Diane R. Seltzer, Ofce Manager/List Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights; Margarette Devlin, Comptroller; Pearl Williams, Assistant Comptroller; Teddy Wright, Receptionist; Microlm and Microcard Services: NAPC, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.On the cover: detail of Piero di Cosimo, Vulcan and Aeolus, circa 1490 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). The drawings on the cover are by John Springs. The drawings on pages 26 and 57 are by David Levine. The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April, May, June, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001 and at additional ofces. Canada Post Corp. Sales Agreement #40031306. Postmaster: Send address changes to The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big Sandy, TX 75755-9310. Subscription services: www.nybooks.com/customer-service, or email nyrsub@nybooks.info, or call 800-354-0050 in the US, 903-636-1101 elsewhere.

Contents 4 Jessica T. Mathews Iran: The New Deal

8 Thomas Powers The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 9May 10, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gaylord Torrence

11 Francine Prose God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

14 Freeman Dyson Albert Einstein: His Space and Times by Steven Gimbel

18 Tim Judah Ukraine: Inside the Deadlock

21 Ian Johnson Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West by Peter Hessler Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler

24 Mark Ford Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Volume II: The Epic Years, 19211939 by A. David Moody

34 David Cole The Angry New Frontier: Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty

36 Ian Frazier I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms selected, translated from the Russian, and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms edited and translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich The Old Woman by Daniil Kharms, adapted by Darryl Pinckney, directed by Robert Wilson, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 2229, 2014 An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky, selected and translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, with additional translations by Matvei Yankelevich and two other books by or about Daniil Kharms

38 W. S. Merwin Poem

40 Annie Sparrow Syria: Death From Assads Chlorine

42 Anthony Grafton Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., February 1May 3, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition by Gretchen A. Hirschauer, Dennis Geronimus, and others

46 Gerard Russell The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East by Eugene Rogan

48 Edith Hall Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works translated from the ancient Greek by Diane J. Rayor, with an introduction and notes by Andr Lardinois

51 Fintan OToole Amnesia by Peter Carey

54 Fritz Stern The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jrgen Osterhammel, translated from the German by Patrick Camiller

55 W. S. Merwin Two Poems

57 Jon O. Newman The Deadly Art of Double Deception

58 Letters from Kevin Di Camillo, Rick Holmes, Dan Chiasson, Michel Balinski, and Paul Holdengrber

DAVID COLE is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center.

FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His new book, Dreams of Earth and Sky, a collection of his writings in these pages, will be published in April.

MARK FORD s Selected Poems and a volume of essays, This Dialogue of One, were published last year. He teaches in the English Department at University College London.

IAN FRAZIER is the author of ten books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia.

ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches European history at Princeton. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.

EDITH HALL is a Professor in the Department of Classics and the Centre for Hellenic Studies at Kings College London.

IAN JOHNSON writes from Beijing and Berlin. He is writing a book on Chinas beliefs and values.

TIM JUDAH is a correspondent for The Economist. For The New York Review he has reported from, among other places, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Serbia, Uganda, and Armenia.

JESSICA T. MATHEWS was President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1997 until this year and she is now a Distinguished Fellow there. She has served in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the White House.

W. S. MERWIN s new poetry collection is The Moon Before Morning.

JON O. NEWMAN is a Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

FINTAN OTOOLE is Literary Editor of The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Prince-ton. His latest book is A History of Ireland in 100 Objects.

THOMAS POWERS s most recent book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He is currently writing a memoir of his father.

FRANCINE PROSE is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard. Her new novel is Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.

GERARD RUSSELL is the author of Heirs to Forgotten King-doms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East. He is a Senior Fellow with the New America Founda-tions International Security Program and a Senior Associate of the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

ANNIE SPARROW , a medical doctor, is an Assistant Profes-sor at the Arnhold Global Health Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

FRITZ STERN is University Professor Emeritus and the former provost of Columbia. He is the author most recently of No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State with Elisabeth Sifton.

CONTRIBUTORS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE

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4 The New York Review

Jessica T. Mathews

1.During the months of negotiating a nu-clear agreement with Iran, opponents of a deal have loudly anticipated failure, ei-ther because a deal wouldnt be reached, wouldnt be good enough, or wouldnt be upheld by Tehran. Charging that the impending deadline made the US too eager to reach a deal, House Speaker John Boehner unaccountably made the pressure worse by announcing that if a deal wasnt struck soon, Congress would immediately impose new sanctions on Iranan act that would preemptively destroy any hope of a nal agreement.

Republican presidential candidates one-upped each other in expressing disapproval of the negotiations. Scott Walker promised to revoke the deal on day one in the White House. Ted Cruz said that anyone who doesnt re-ject the deal isnt t to be president. Senate Foreign Relations Commit-tee Chairman Bob Corker promoted an early vote on a bill that ostensibly would give Congress a voice on the ac-ceptability of the deal but was actually laced with poison pills that could de-stroy the negotiating process. So while most Americans hoped for an agree-ment, Congress geared up to restart a ferocious debate on a question of paramount national security about an agreement that did not yet exist.

The deal nally reached on April 2 was a surprise. While the announce-ment referred only to parameters, summarized in individual press re-leases by each participant country, taken together, the elements that were made public are stronger than outsid-ers (and, reportedly, some insiders) ex-pected. Iran agrees to cut the number of its centrifuges from about 19,000 to 6,100 (5,060 in operation). Rather than export its 10,000-kilogram stockpile of enriched uranium, Iran agrees to shrink it to 300 kilograms. As was ex-pected, no facilities are to be destroyed, but the underground enrichment facil-ity at Fordow, of particular concern be-cause it is impervious to most bombing, will be converted to a research center.* No enrichment will take place there for at least fteen years. The plutonium-producing reactor at Arak will be per-manently recongured, and Iran has committed indenitely not to repro-cess spent fuel, the process that sepa-rates out the pure plutonium needed for a bomb. Various commitments last from ten to as long as twenty-ve years.

While many details are missing, in-spections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are to cover the entire supply chain of ssile mate-rialfrom uranium mines to the mills where ore is processed, the facilities where it is chemically transformed be-fore being enriched, and the manufac-turing sites where centrifuge rotors are produced. A new mechanism will be created to track sensitive imports. The signicance of such broad inspections

is that if fully implemented, they would make it extremely hard for Iran to op-erate a secret weapons program.

In return, sanctions imposed by the US and its partners will be sus-pended once the IAEA certies that Iran has, in the words of the US sum-mary, taken all of its key nuclear- related steps. Since that would require a very long time and the language is notably vague, one has to suspect that the timing of sanctions reliefa key sticking point throughoutis still in question. Other important issues, such as inspections of the facilities where weapons-related work may have taken place, are not covered or are described so vaguely that they remain unclear.

The use of parallel announcements by the negotiating countries without a jointly signed document invites later

disagreements over what was actually decided. Even in the rst few hours, dis-putes surfaced over whether Iran has or hasnt agreed to the IAEAs Additional Protocol, which provides, among other things, for delivery of more informa-tion to the IAEA and greater rights of access for its inspectorsan essential element of a veriable agreement. One has to conclude that the negotiations still to come before the June 30 dead-line will not just be about lling in the technical details and drafting airtight languagea huge task in itselfbut in resolving several, and particularly di-visive, issues that could not be agreed on at Lausanne. All that said, when we remember where this process began nearly two years ago and the years of failed attempts that preceded it, Presi-dent Obama was within his rights in calling what has been achieved so far a historic understanding. In a long conversation with The New York Times three days later (April 5) elaborating on the pros and cons of a deal, he was again right in saying that even if Iran is implacably as bad as its greatest crit-ics believe, this deal would still be the best option for US and Israeli security.

2.The US and Iran must each now sell the deal back home, a more than usually difcult task since so much is still to be negotiated. In Tehran, at Friday prayers the day after the announcement, cler-ics who speak for the Supreme Leader voiced cautious support for the deal. One could wish the same for Washing-ton. Here the loudest critics, who may talk about fewer centrifuges, or a longer period before Iran could break out and produce sufcient uranium for a

weapon, or their conviction that Iran will cheat, are actually hopingthough few will admit to itfor no deal.

Their reasons differ. Some want to inict a crushing defeat on President Obama (include in this group the forty-seven senators who put a partisan vic-tory over the nations security and, one must add, their self-respect in signing the infamous letter of Senator Tom Cotton, which warned Iranian lead-ers that an agreement with President Obama was likely to be quickly re-jected by members of Congress or the next president). Others harbor a real fear: that any deal would be a rst step toward ending thirty-ve years of fro-zen hostility between the US and Iran, perhaps fundamentally shifting the power balance in the Middle East. In this category we can put Prime Minis-

ter Benjamin Netanyahu, AIPAC, the powerful, pro-Israel lobby group that follows his lead, and the government of Saudi Arabia, among others.

Between historic opportunity and di-sastrous mistake, what should Ameri-cans think? By denition, a negotiated agreement is imperfect. This one in particular entails risks, costs, extended vigilance, and a signicant chance of future failure. Judging it begins and ends with clarity about what choices are truly before us. That has a simple answer: there are only two alternatives to a negotiated deal.

One is a return to the situation that prevailed for a decade before negotia-tions began and before an interim agree-ment was reached at the end of 2013. In the best case (in which Iran is seen to have been the cause of negotiating fail-ure), punishing multilateral sanctions would continue. Irans leaders would respond as they have before, standing up to foreigners pressure by continu-ing their nuclear programadding more advanced centrifuges, stockpiling enriched uranium, completing a reac-tor that produces plutonium, and tak-ing Iran to the threshold of a nuclear weapon and perhaps beyond. There might continue to be some international inspectors on the ground, though with far less access than at present.

We know where this option leads, for it has been well tested. In 2003, the US rejected an Iranian proposal that would have capped its centrifuges at 3,000. By the time the current negotiations started a decade later, the standoff cre-ated by more sanctions and more cen-trifuges had resulted in costs of nearly $100 billion to Iran from sanctions and its production of 19,000 centrifuges. The lesson of sanctionsfrom Cuba to Russia and beyondis that they can

impose a cost on wrongdoing, but if the sanctioned country chooses to pay the price, sanctions cannot prevent it from continuing the sanctioned activities.

The second alternative is bombing Irans nuclear facilities. Even support-ers of this option do not believe that it would do more than delay Irans prog-ress by more than two to four years. It would certainly unite all Iranians around the absolute necessity of having a nuclear deterrent. It would strengthen Irans hard-liners, radicalizing its poli-tics and probably prolonging clerical rule. While the bombed facilities were being rebuilt, with more of them being put securely underground, there would be no inspectors or cameras. Outsiders would know far less than they do now about what is being built and where or how close Iran had come to producing a bomb. Soon another round of bomb-ing would be necessary.

Is there a third alternative, namely a tougher deal that requires no enrich-ment in Iran and the destruction of its nuclear infrastructure? Prime Minister Netanyahu promised in his appearance before Congress that the US can get such a deal by call[ing] their bluff. Simply walk away from the table and theyll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do. If sanctions brought Iran to the table, this argument goes, more sanctions and more pressure will get us everything we want. It sounds rea-sonable, but it fails on closer inspection.

First, of course, the argument ignores the essence of negotiationthat nei-ther side gets everything it wants. Also, although it is true that sanctions are imposing real pain on the Iranian econ-omy, there are many in Irans power elite, especially in the Revolutionary Guard, who prot from the countrys isolation and would welcome continuing sanctions. Others oppose a deal for ide-ological reasons. The balance in Iranian politics that brought negotiators into se-rious talks for the rst time was long in coming and remains precarious. If the US were to reverse course, abandoning negotiations in hopes of a winner-take-all outcome, Iran would follow suit.

Moreover, if other nations found Americas reasons for rejecting a deal unreasonable, support for multilateral sanctions would quickly erode. Soon we would be back to ineffective, unilat-eral sanctions.

The question, then, is whether pro-ponents of this approach have diag-nosed fundamental weaknesses in the deal that has been reached and genu-inely believe that renewed negotiation could strengthen it, or whether they are counting on both sides walking away from the table and not returning. The fact that so many of thememphati-cally including Netanyahutrashed the deal before it existed and make de-mands they know to be nonnegotiable strongly suggests that the insistence that the US negotiate a better deal is phony. Its advocates should be pushed to describe exactly what they think could be extracted from Iran. The an-swers should be measured against real-ity, keeping in mind that Iran does not come to the table as a nation that has been defeated on the battleeld but as a country with enormous natural resources that has, over many years, reached near-nuclear status.

The argument for adding nonnu-clear issues to the negotiations at this

The New Deal

US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, Secretary of State John Kerry, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic

Energy Organization of Iran, Lausanne, Switzerland, March 2015

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*For more on both the activities that will be forbidden at Fordow and the scientic research that might take place there, see Jeremy Bernstein, A New Future for Iranian Physics?, NYRblog, April 3, 2015.WorldMags.net

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6 The New York Review

pointsuch as demanding that Iran must rst agree to end support for terrorismis equally untenable. The decision to limit the negotiations to Irans nuclear program was made, more than two years ago, for good reason. The number of grievances each side had against the other, and the decades-deep reservoir of distrust between them, meant that an all-encompassing agenda would reduce the already slim chances of success to near zero. Adding in the differing views of the P5+1 part-ners (China, France, Russia, the UK, the US, and Germany) only reinforces the conclusion. The goal posts cannot reasonably be moved now to include other aspects of Iranian policy, no mat-ter how objectionable.

3. It is too soon to comment in detail about the elements of the agreement, especially about its all-important in-spections, monitoring, and verication provisions, but two particularly vexing issues deserve attention.

Breakout time is often considered the measure of an acceptable agree-ment. It is not, as so often portrayed, the time required to build a bomb. It is dened only as the time needed to accumulate enough highly enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon, and it is an estimate, based on a num-ber of assumptions. This accounts, in part, for differences in the numbers being quarreled about. The difference between the two to three months that Iran would need today and the twelve months that Iran would need under the

agreement is highly signi cant. The difference between ten months and twelve months is meaningless.

More to the point is what comes next. After accumulating the fuel, a country has to make the actual weapon and then, presumably, test it. That, of course, means enough fuel for two weapons, not one. But the military value of a sin-gle nuclear weapon is close to zero. In-deed, if that weapon provokes a weaker adversarySaudi Arabia, in Irans caseto acquire nuclear weapons of its own, the net result is not an asset but a tremendous liability.

For Iran to acquire a nuclear arsenal useful against Israel would require an enormous, highly visible, and easily detected effort over years. The only exception would be a choice to com-mit national suicide, for which a single bomb would sufce.

Breakout time is, in short, a useful measure but far from being the single important one. With appropriate re-strictions on the production of pluto-nium and highly enriched uranium and tight inspections and monitoring, far less than twelve months would actually be needed to detect and respond to an attempt by Iran to race for a weapon.

The second issue is the matter of when and to what degree Iran will re-veal what it actually did in the past in pursuing a nuclear weapon. The IAEA has had a long list of questions about these activities that Iran has refused to answer for years. The US summary of the agreement says only that Iran will implement an agreed set of measures to address these concerns about past actions, suggesting that this issue, too, has not yet been agreed on.

Legitimate and highly emotional ques-tions will be raised on this matter. My guess is that it will prove to be a continu-ing stumbling block for negotiations. To clear up the questions, Iran would have to admit to violating its commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty it signed in 1970. Nationsall nationshate to admit such error. Irans case will be even more difcult because of the fatwa issued by the Supreme Leader de-claring nuclear weapons to be a violation of the principles of the Islamic Republic.

It may be necessary to work around the issue in some way, perhaps post-poning the resolution for some years until public attention ebbs. Demands that Iran come clean are natural, but learning exactly what Iran did will have only modest technical value. Some call-ing for this information simply want to embarrass Tehran, or to pose a condi-tion that will block an agreement. In the end, we may need to decide whether we care more about the future or the past. If so, this should be an easy call.

4.The most signicant objection, not to this agreement but to any agreement, is the one that primarily fuels Israels efforts to prevent a deal. It is the fear that an agreement will lead to Iran re-joining the international community, to warming relations between Tehran and Washington, and to a change in the familiar alignment of nations in the Middle East. These are valid fears.

For most countries in the world, re-solving the nuclear issue will mean that normal relations with Iran will soon fol-low. This was inevitable: Iran would not stay a pariah nation forever. And while more normal relations with the interna-tional community may or may not lead to less aggressive policies and less support for terrorism on Tehrans part, contin-ued outsider status is unlikely to change its behavior. With sanctions lifted, Iran will have much more money to spendsome of it for destructive purposes. That, too, is a price of an agreement.

On the other hand, the concern that the United States will return to the days of the Shah, closely aligning itself with Iran, is overblown. As the prospect of an agreement has neared, opponents have pushed this fear so far to the fore that they argue that the change they dread has already occurred. According to the Republican commentator Mi-chael Gerson, evidence for an evolv-ing administration attitude toward Iran has been on display in both Syria and Iraq. Republicans sense a major shift in American policya desire to cozy up with Iran. But the temporary con-vergence of American and Iranian in-terests in defeating ISIS in Iraq would exist whether nuclear talks were un-derway or not. Similarly, Washingtons prolonged indecision and its refusal to intervene militarily in Syrias four-year-old conict without a political solution in sight long predates the opening with Iran. The same is true for the burgeon-ing war in Yemen, where Washington chooses not to intervene militarily for compelling local reasons, not because Iran is backing the Houthi rebels.

It is impossible to predict whether a nuclear agreement will lead to better re-lations between the US and Iran in the near term. Hard-liners in both countries may respond by ratcheting up tensions on many other issues. Eventually, though,

removing the absolute block to normal relations caused by Irans nuclear pro-gram would open the possibility of be-ginning to address the many other issues that divide Washington and Tehran. If that happens, it can only be to the good, but there is no reason to believe that the US will carelessly abandon its manifold objections to Iranian policies.

Nervousness on the part of the Sunni nations, particularly the Gulf States, is inevitable. Some of them can hardly decide whether they fear a nuclear deal more or less than a nuclear Iran. So far, the administration has shown care in addressing their concerns. The timing of the announcement that the US would resume arms sales to Egypt was not unrelated to the nuclear talks. And in announcing the deal, the president also announced an invitation to Saudi Ara-bia and the other Gulf States to meet at Camp David to discuss strengthening security cooperation.

5.The weeks ahead are of enormous con-sequence to US national security, not only with respect to Iran, but to our long-term ability to frame and execute a coherent foreign policy not determined solely by partisan motives. If Congress takes steps to reject the nuclear deal be-fore it is completed, or if it undermines US negotiators by raising further doubts in Tehran that Washington will ever meet its commitments to lift sanctions, it will have done signicant long-term damage to US power in ways that no amount of military strength can offset. The US ability to lead, to shape interna-tional relations, and to inuence other countries decisions depends on its stat-ure. A country that follows one policy through several presidencies with bipar-tisan support and then suddenly reverses course midstream will be diminished. A country that cannot speak abroad with a single voice will not command the re-spect the US expects and needs.

If a nal deal can ultimately be nego-tiated, Congress will have a major part to play when it must decide whether Irans behavior merits lifting legislative sanctions. Long before that, Congress should have a full opportunity to assess the agreement, which can only be done after negotiations are completed. Chair-man Corker should underline the lead-ership position he took in not signing the Cotton letter by postponing a vote on this bill until early July and adjusting its language accordingly. Later, Congresss oversight of the deals implementation should be robust. Optimally, a special body can be created to receive frequent, highly classied briengs and to travel to Iran to judge for itself whether the agreements terms are being fully met.

Those who worry that a deal with Iran will entail some risk should re-member that preventing nuclear prolif-eration almost never happens in a single leap. Countries change direction slowly. International rules and norms are built up brick by brick over years. Techni-cal capacities to monitor and political expectations are gradually but steadily strengthened. The agreement with Iran, if one is nally reached, will not be the end, but a beginning. It must be strong and carefully framed and minutely monitored, but it need not be watertight in order for it to ultimately open the way to a permanently nonnuclear Iran.

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May 7, 2015 7

BRUCE SILVERSTEIN535 West 24th Street / New York, NY 10011 / 212 627 3930 / www.brucesilverstein.com

Keith A. SmithTHE FABRIC WORKS, 1964 1980April 23 June 6, 2015

Margaret Gave Me a Rainbow: 2:30pm 21 November, 19713M Color-in-Color mylar from inside the copier, heat transferred

(with hand iron) to manilla paper hand stitched to cloth. Torn silver print of my ear machine-sewn to cloth. Tassels machine-sewn to a segment

of the green Army sheet taken from my bed, as I had no cloth that color on hand, machine-sewn onto yellow cotton yardage.

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8 The New York Review

A Tale of Woe and GloryThomas Powers

The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Skyan exhibition at the Muse du quai Branly, Paris, April 8July 20, 2014; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, September 19, 2014 January 11, 2015; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 9May 10, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gaylord Torrence. Skira Rizzoli/Muse du quai Branly, 317 pp., $65.00

A kind of twilight invites silence in a show of Plains Indian art and material culture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that records their long moment of glory before the United States Army whipped them, as whites liked to say at the time, and conned them to reser-vations in the last quarter of the nine-teenth century. The twilight is easily explained. Much of the art in the show is painted on tanned hides using natural dyes subject to fading in strong lightblanket-like robes, mens shirts worn as a badge of ofce or status, shields and shield covers, the rawhide cases called pareches that women painted with geometric designs. But the twilight also seems right for what remains of a culture so utterly confounded by the invasion of richer, better-armed people with robust immune systems and an ob-session with building fences.

What remains includes many very early items from European collec-tions, especially the Muse du quai Branly in Paris, an organizer of the show along with the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Painted robes and feathered headdresses collected by European explorers, traders, and mis-sionaries beginning around 1700 re-ect the world before the arrival of the horse on the Plains. Just when that hap-pened is still hotly argued by scholars. The Sicangu Lakota chief Spotted Tail (circa 18231881) told an army ofcer that when his father was a boy the Si-cangu still traveled from place to place with only dogs to pull their belongings.

Scholars say the rst horses arrived on the Plains a good deal earlier than that, perhaps as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, but the impor-tant fact is what followeda dramatic expansion of the Indians ability to kill buffalo. Their meat fed an exploding Indian population, and tanned buffalo robes, sold to white traders, nanced the purchase of guns, powder and ball, glass beads, new dyes, trade cloth, iron pots and steel knives, and a wide range of other items of Euro-American manufacture.

The breadth and suddenness of the change would be hard to exaggerate. In the winter of 17871788 an old Cree In-dian named Saukamappee told a young fur trader of a big ght with another tribe in which he took part as a youth in about 1720. His band had few guns and less ammunition; most of the men, including Saukamappees father, were armed with bows, and of the fty ar-rows in his fathers quiver only ten had iron points. The others were headed with stone.

With this detail we can date almost the minute of the Crees introduction

to the modern world. Within a few years at most all the arrows in every quiver on the plains would have iron points. Saukamappees tale is included in Our Hearts Fell to the Ground,1 a collection of Plains Indian testimony and reminiscence collected by Colin Calloway, a Dartmouth professor who has also written an impressively lively and comprehensive essay in the catalog of the Met show, The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky.

The horse is the rst great fact in the lives of the Plains Indians during their glory years, Calloway tells us; the next is disease, especially smallpox, pneu-monia, cholera, and measles, which decimated the Plains tribes in a wave of epidemics beginning pretty much at the moment Spanish explorers arrived looking for rumored cities of gold. Some tribes were lucky, some not. The population of the Caddo, who lived in Texas and along the lower Mississippi River, was cut down in successive epi-demics from perhaps 200,000 to as few as 10,000. Half the Pawnees died in the early 1830s. The Blackfeet, once lords of the northern Plains, were reduced by two thirds in the great smallpox epi-demic of 1837, brought up the Missouri River by traders.

But none suffered a loss more cata-strophic than the Mandan. Once a great tribe, they were reduced by smallpox in the 1780s. When Lewis and Clark ar-

rived in 1804 to spend the winter, the Mandan were living in two remaining villages, Matootonha and Rooptahee, home to about two thousand people. Later the Mandan were hosts to the traveling painter George Catlin in 1832 and the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer a year later. Both painted the portrait of Mat TpeFour Bearsa leading man in the Mandan villages and an artist much inuenced, it has been argued, by watching Catlin and Bodmer at work. The smallpox epidemic of 1837 pretty well rubbed them out, a phrase that entered English from Plains Indian sign language. In July of that year Mat Tpe died of smallpox on the very day he delivered a bitter deathbed speech to his people:

My friends one and all, Listen to what I have to sayEver since I can remember, I have loved the Whites. . . . But to day, I do Pro-nounce them to be a set of Black harted dogs, they have deceived Me, them that I always considered as Brothers. . . . I do not fear Death my friends. You Know it, but to die with my face rotten, that even the Wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me, and say to themselves, that is the 4 Bears the Friend of the Whites. . . .

When the smallpox ran its course that fall the Mandan had been reduced to 138 survivors.

In his prime Mat Tpe painted many leather robes with images from his life as a warrior. One of them was col-lected by a Swiss trader on the Upper

Missouri in the year the artist died; it is on loan to the Met exhibition from its current home in the Bern Historical Museum in Switzerland. Depicted are a series of war exploits including a hand-to-hand ght between Mat Tpe and a Cheyenne wielding a knife that the Mandan has grabbed by the blade, cut-ting himself severelya copious spray of blood falls from the wound.

That Mat Tpe turned the tables and killed the Cheyenne is impressive, but the really startling thing is the way he has drawn the two guresa radi-cal change in style from another robe in the show, now in Harvards Peabody Museum, by an artist near the Missouri River. Dating of the Peabody robe is difcult. It was long believed to have been collected by Lewis and Clark but doubts have crept in; it might have been painted as early as 1780, in the opinion of Castle McLaughlin, a curator at the Peabody who published a book about artifacts collected (maybe) by Lewis and Clark, Arts of Diplomacy,2 and who has written several entries in the Met exhibitions catalog. But the date could be as late as 1825.

No matter. The point is the style. Like Mat Tpes robe, the Peabody robe records incidents of battle but the gures are presented very simply and convey less information. They are not primitive, just different. They have round heads without facial features. Their arms and legs are tapering sticks. Their torsos are all represented by boxes in trapezoidal shape, wide at the shoulder, narrower at the waist. There are a number of robes decorated with trapezoid men in the Met exhibition, all early, all executed before the arrival on the Upper Missouri of Catlin and Bod-mer, who clearly dazzled Mat Tpe and his friends. The new drawing style spread quickly and eventually gener-ated a large body of work by Plains artists, generally called ledger draw-ings because so much of it was drawn on paper torn from ledger books found at military and trading posts. Several outstanding examples of this later work are included in the show, including drawings by the Southern Cheyenne Howling Wolf, the Kiowa Wohaw, the Teton Sioux Black Hawk, and others whose names are not known.

But the most dazzling of the new-style drawings, in my view, is a large (twenty-four by sixty-six inches) drawing of a sun dance by an unnamed artist created near the end of the nineteenth century, when the sun dance, like many other rituals and ceremonies, had been for-bidden by the authorities. An authori-tative account of the Lakota sun dance was published by James R. Walker in 1917; the sun dance drawing in the Met exhibition conveys a rich feel for the place of the ceremony in tribal life and conrms many details of Walkers observations. Dangling from the top of the sun dance pole in the center of the drawing, for example, are two small rawhide cutouts of a man and a buffalo,

Mat Top: Battle with a Cheyenne Chief, 1833

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1Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost (Bedford/St. Martins, 1996).

2Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis and Clarks Indian Collection (University of Wash-ington Press, 2003).WorldMags.net

WorldMags.net

May 7, 2015 9

I have no memories of Diane Arbus. Not even of a phone call, let alone

a face-to-face meeting. I was eight years old when she killed herself. They

tell me I was playing baseball in the backyard in St. Louis when the phone

rang, but I do not remember even that.

Maybe that was because she was a secret in our house. Her brother,

Howard Nemerov, my father, did not say much about her that I recall. They

were close, yes, especially when they were children, but she was out of his

mind, so far as I could tell, in those years when I grew up.

A sign of this was the fate of a photograph she gave hima print of

her most famous one, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1966, made out to him

along the white edge at the bottom: for h. Diane Arbus. It was a photo-

graph he never matted, never framed, and never even displayed. Instead, it

was kept in a drawer in the living room of our house, mingled among my

childhood drawing supplies, the sheets of paper and colored pens. Predict-

ably in that place the photograph suffered damage, creases and some cracks

in the emulsion. Meanwhile, across the room, my father hung a large pon-

derous landscape painting by his father, David Nemerov, a person I dont

think he liked very much, on the wall above the couch. Countryside Serenity

was the title, inscribed on a golden plaque on the gold-and-white frame. . . .

ALEXANDER NEMEROV

from Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus & Howard Nemerov

available at www.fraenkelgallery.com

distributed by ARTBOOK/D.A.P. www.artbook.com

FRAENKEL GALLERY BOOKS49 Geary Street, San Francisco

415.981.2661

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10 The New York Review

hard to identify unless you know what they are.

Most Plains Indian drawing, whether on robes, shirts, or paper, was a bold artistic assertion of the self. To draw, sing, act out, or simply tell of personal experience, almost all of it triumphal, was a vital expression of male ego on the Plainslike Mat Tpes visual ac-count of his ght with the Cheyenne, a signal achievement he also recorded with a twelve-by-fteen-inch water-color on paper now in Omahas Joslyn Art Museum, which is reproduced in the Met exhibitions catalog. The wa-tercolor is almost obsessive in its atten-tion to detail. Mat Tpes upper body is painted red, his moccasins have yel-low stripes, his leggings are decorated with multicolored fringe, and drawn superimposed across his waist is a pipe, sign that he was leader of a war party. No Mandan of the time, or scholar of today, could fail to know who this isMat Tpe!

The Cheyenne is also meticulously portrayed. He has painted himself green, he is wearing an otterskin bon-net, a powder horn hangs from his shoulder, and his leggings are elabo-rately painted and decorated with beads or porcupine quills. Mat Tpe wants to be sure we know he killed a formidable Cheyenne warrior in his prime. Both gures are drawn in the round in the Catlin-Bodmer style, which soon banished the trapezoid men entirely from Plains art.

By the time the sun dance artist went to work fty or sixty years after the death of Mat Tpe, immense changes were apparent in the conventions of drawing and painting by Plains Indians. Personal exploits were still the main subject matter but some artists, like the sun dance master, had a broader subject in mind, not too different from that of Italian painters of religious scenes during the Renaissance, which might be dened as the depiction of so-cial life sustained by a sacred sacrice of blood.

The midsummer sun dance cere-mony is as bloody as a crucixion, and makes a similar promise. In the draw-ing the men who have painted them-selves yellow, as Janet Berlo writes in the catalog, have elected to perform the most sacred and painful act of piercing their pectoral muscles and at-taching themselves to the central pole, nally ripping their bodies away in an act of blood sacrice that aligns them with the potent powers of the sun. The men who sacriced their esh before the ban in the 1880s, and have resumed doing so in recent decades, were carrying out personal vows, beg-ging pity from the Wakan Tanka (La-kota for Great Spirit) or expressing thanks by the shedding of blood for some gift like the recovery from illness of a loved one.

While the dancers each had his own reason for dancing, the annual cer-emony was also considered vital to the welfare of the whole people. There is no way of knowing if the sun dance art-ist included himself among the dancers he depicted; if so, he has done it qui-etly, while his painting celebrates the entire social experience, not just the dancers but all those watching, women wrapped in robes and carrying umbrel-las, children, drummers, and singers, everybody dressed in their best, the community at large that is thus sus-tained for another year. The assertion

has shifted from me, Mat Tpe! to us, the People!

Everything in the Met exhibition could be described at similar length, and most of the objects are in the shows catalog. But the show tells us something the catalog does not, or at least not as clearly. It is implicit in the arrangement or layout of the displays, which begin with two sculptures, both pipes for smoking, both in the form of a human gure. The older of the two, dated to roughly the beginning of the Christian Era, was found in the Adena Mound near Chillicothe, Ohio. It is carved from Catlinite or pipestone, which is still quarried in Minnesota for the making of traditional T-shaped peace pipes. The younger of the two was found in the 1930s by amateurs excavating the Spiro mound in Okla-homa. It is carved from bauxite and is dated to about the year 1100, a few hundred years before the arrival of Co-lumbus in the New World, an event that was promptly followed by numerous Spaniards carrying viruses to which Native Americans had no resistance.

Some scholars believe that the new diseases may have killed as much as 90 percent of an Indian population estimated to be as large as 50 million, roughly the size of Europes in 1492. What happened to the makers of these two human-gure pipes is impossible to say, but one thing seems clearthey along with their culture and art disap-peared utterly from what became the United States. Their fate was the one all cultures seem to fear and dreada rubbing out to the very last person. The message of those pipes, a whisper of ultimate twilight, is what opens the Met show.

At the other end of the exhibi-tion, around the corner in a hall more brightly lit, is a sampling of some re-ally ne modern thingsbeaded dance outts like one worn by the Hunkpapa Lakota Jodi Gillette, a traditional dancer; old crafts put to new uses like a beaded suitcase made by Nellie Two Bear Gates for the 1909 graduation of her daughter from the Carlisle In-dian School; paintings that dramati-cally merge old and new styles; a war shirt made of photographs created by the Northern Cheyenne Bently Spang; a Kiowa fan from the 1940s made of eagle feathers, something now permit-ted only to Native Americans for sacred purposes; a Sicangu star quilt in a style the Lakota have taken for their own.

All are beautiful and bold and rep-resent a clear statement of a perennial Native American protest that might be dated to 1908 or 1910 when the pho-tographer Edward S. Curtis published a photograph of Navajo on horseback disappearing into the desert dusk that he titled The Vanishing Race. At every opportunity since, Indians have pro-claimed, We are still here! The Met exhibition is arranged to end on a note clearly afrming that.

But this vigorous modern work can-not alter certain facts, there for anyone who cares to see. A map on the wall at the opening of the show identies about thirty separate tribes from six different language families that peo-pled the Plains when the very rst trad-ers arrived to buy furs on the Upper Missouri. Three of those languages are extinctTonkawa, Quapaw, and Kitsai. A dozen others are spoken only

by a relative handful of elderly people, from roughly two hundred in the case of the Assiniboine-Stoney, down to ten or twenty in the case of the Gros Ventre, Hidatsa, and Osage. Even the Cree speakers in Canada number only 70,000.

What happened to the Plains lan-guages happened in the same way over the same period to the animal and plant life of the Plains encountered by Lewis and Clark, most conspicuously and dramatically to the buffalo, re-duced from perhaps 30 million in the early 1800s to fewer than a thousand in 1900. In recent months climatologists have darkened the picture still further with predictions of a coming period of megadroughts threatening hard times

for everything that walks, creeps, or draws moisture up through root la-ments on the Great Plains.

Something of that judgment is cap-tured in a 2001 collage created by the Oglala Lakota artist Arthur Amiotte, which strikes a note about as far from celebration as it is possible to get. The work may be modern but the feeling has been fermenting for a century or more. Amiotte is a great-grandson of Henry Standing Bear, who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 when he was a young man of sixteen or seventeen; he was lucky to be touring in Europe with Buffalo Bill at the time of the massacre of more than two hun-dred Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890, when he had just turned thirty.

Even to whisper the words Wounded Knee invites this dark event to take over, but the Met exhibition does not shrink back, beginning with Amiottes collage. His work is framed with press clippings of the Little Bighorn ght, photos of the dead at Wounded Knee and the nearby church where many of the wounded spent their last hours. In the center are portraits of Kicking Bear, the Brule Arnold Short Bull, the Paiute ghost dance messiah Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, and Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa chief whose killing led to the massacre. Those who want to know more about this painful event should read Jerome Greenes recent and authoritative account, American Carnage.3

Also included in the exhibition is a remarkable ink drawing on muslin of the last moments of Sitting Bull, when about forty Indian police from the Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota approached the chiefs cabin to place him under arrest. The draw-ing was made in about 1920 by one of the Indian police who had been there, Thomas Stone Man, who left little ad-ditional impression on history. This drawing is richly detailed with the names of the dead, both Indian police and supporters of Sitting Bull, and a kind of chronology of the unfolding of events. No deposition in court could have conveyed what Thomas Stone Man saw more meticulously.

But it is the stunning item at the very center of the show that serves to capture what the curators want to say about the Plains Indians during their glory years ending in social trauma. Displayed by itself between two curv-ing walls in a kind of mini-chapel is a striking womans dress identied as a Southern Arapaho ghost dance dress of 1890. The dress, which belongs to the California investment manager and art collector Kenneth Siebel, is similar to others found in the collections of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. In the notes on the Siebel dress written for the catalog by Emma Hansen, a senior curator of the Buffalo Bill Center, we are told noth-ing about the history of the dress and it is my guess that Siebel and Hansen alike have very little idea of where it has been for the last 120 years.

The dress is made of hide colored brick red with rubbed-in pigment. The sleeve ends, side seams, and skirt are decorated with abundant ne green fringes. A bottom border is blue with many four-pointed stars. The body of the dress is decorated with drawings front and back including a left hand in yellow, a turtle, thunderbirds, a mag-pie, a buffalo, a large four-pointed star, and other symbols and images with powerful traditional meanings. Was this dress ever worn by a ghost dancer? Without a solid provenance it is impossible to say, but the images on the dress are eloquent evidence of the whole-souled yearning that was ex-pressed in the ghost dance movement of 1890.

It was Wovoka, a Northern Paiute liv-ing in Nevada, who had the vision that inspired the dancers. They believed that dancing in a new sacred way, sing-ing special songs while wearing special shirts and dresses, would restore their old life on the Plains, bringing back the buffalo that had disappeared so com-pletely it was widely believed they had gone back into the earth, and restoring to life all the people who had died in war and massacre.

The dancing spread across the Plains, north and south, and whites grew frightened, with predictable result. The Southern Arapaho ghost dance dress expresses the impossible dream of a people who have lost everything but memory. The Arthur Amiotte collage tells us how the dream died, leaving a couple of hundred bodies frozen in the snow along Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. So for all its beauty the Met exhibition is a tale of glory and woe ending not with a song but a wail, something like the cry of Mat Tpe on his deathbed, ruing the day he saw the whites coming up the Missouri River.

Ghost Dance Dress; Southern Arapaho artist, Oklahoma, circa 1890

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3American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).WorldMags.net

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May 7, 2015 11

Growing Up Too BlackFrancine Prose

God Help the Childby Toni Morrison. Knopf, 178 pp., $24.95

The title of Toni Morrisons new novel echoes that of the sly, langorous Billie Holiday ballad God Bless the Child. But while the child in the song is blessed, or deserves to be blessed, be-cause hes got his ownsomething, presumably money, that will enable him to thrive regardless of what Mama may havethe children in God Help the Child have nothing: no power, no agency, no protection from the unfeel-ing or predatory adults around them.

The novel begins with a woman who calls herself Sweetness absolving her-self for having had a daughter whose skin is much darker than her own, and explaining why she has mistreated little Lula Ann:

Its not my fault. So you cant blame me. I didnt do it and have no idea how it happened. It didnt take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black. . . . Some of you probably think its a bad thing to group our-selves according to skin colorthe lighter, the betterin social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sorori-ties, even colored schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dig-nity? . . . I hate to say it, but from the very beginning in the mater-nity ward the baby, Lula Ann, em-barrassed me.

Such passages remind us that Morri-son, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993, has consistently proved herself to be an intrepid writer, boldly report-ing on the ongoing war between kind-ness and cruelty, acknowledging how often children are the collateral dam-age in those battles and, in this open-ing salvo, taking on the delicate subject of color prejudice within the African-American community. Though race and class are important elements in the novel, it gradually becomes clear that any child, regardless of skin color or social status, can fall prey to the horrors that adults visit upon the young.

Sweetness is hardly the worst mother in the book, and unlike the more luck-less children whose stories Morrison tells here, Lula Ann overcomes (or ap-pears to have overcome) the damage inicted by a woman who has chosen a new name just to distance herself from her daughter. I told her to call me Sweetness instead of Mother or Mama. It was safer. Being that black and having what I think are too-thick lips calling me Mama would confuse people.

Lula Ann Bridewell grows up to be a beautiful woman who also rechristens herself, dropping that dumb, country-ed name as soon as I left high school. I was Ann Bride for two years until I interviewed for a job at Sylvia, Inc., and, on a hunch, shortened my name to Bride, with nothing anyone needs to say before or after that one memorable syllable. Bride carefully selects her

wardrobe and so effectively deploys her intelligence, ambition, and good looks that, while still in her twenties, she runs a major department in a billion-dollar company:

I named it YOU, GIRL: Cosmetics for Your Personal Millennium. Its for girls and women of all complex-ions from ebony to lemonade to milk. And its mine, all minethe idea, the brand, the campaign.

All of this may strike us as quite un-like Morrisons previous novels, most of which have been set in the past. Be-loved took place around the time of the Civil War, A Mercy in the late seven-teenth century; Home was set in the aftermath of the Korean War. But God Help the Child offers a take on con-temporary manners that at rst seems closer to satire then anything Morrison has done so far.

Bride drives a sleek, rat gray Jag-uar with a vanity license, drinks Smart-water, wears an oyster-white cashmere dress and boots of brushed rabbit fur the color of the moon, and measures her sexual relationships against those double-page spreads in fashion maga-zines, you know, couples standing half-naked in surf, looking so erce and downright mean, their sexuality like lightning and the sky going dark to show off the shine of their skin.

Theres a complex irony in the idea of a woman who has been made miser-able because of her color growing up to become a purveyor of luxury skin-care products. And we may wonder if Morrison is planning to look more critically at our cultures attempts to convince women that buying the perfect moisturizer is the key to hap-piness and fulllment. But Bride, haunted by crimes and betrayals far worse than this relatively benign form of consumer fraud, isnt particularly

troubled by the political implications of her profession:

In addition to breasts, every woman . . .wanted longer, thicker eyelashes. A woman could be cobra-thin and starving, but if she had grapefruit boobs and rac-coon eyes, she could be deliriously happy. Right. She would get right on it after this trip.

It might have been interesting to see Bride at a sales meeting or in the boardroom, but this is not that kind of book. Morrison is more engaged by beauty in the abstract, and by larger concernssurface vs. substance, the extent to which childhood, appearance, and prejudice mold and deform usthan by the details of what a woman does at a lucrative and glamorous job.

At various points the novel shifts from the familiar and the real to the allegorical and the mythic, and then shifts back again. The challenge that Morrison has set for herself is to have it both ways, more or less at once: to pop-ulate a fairy tale with credible human beings and to set it in a world in which the paranormal coexists with the same electronic gadgets and brand names we recognize from our own.

The change of setting from past to present is reected in the novels prose. The lyricism of Home (Maniac moon-light doing the work of absent stars matched his desperate frenzy) and the intentional obscurities of Paradise have mostly given way to more colloquial vo-cabulary and syntax. The sentences are shorter, less ornately decorated with metaphor and simile, and this unin-ected sparsenessthe voice seems to t a range of charactersserves Morri-son well as the narratives point of view moves deftly among them.

God Help the Child reminds us of how enjoyable it can be when a writer uses multiple perspectivesa tech-nique by which Morrison insists on considering variant aspects of a situa-tion and on facing the contradictions that arise from her characters often mercurial and tormented psyches. As she so frequently has in the past, she combines tough-mindedness with for-giveness as she propels Bride through tragedy toward greater self-knowledge and a conclusion brightened by peni-tence and hope. Even Sweetness is al-lowed to express her humanity and remorse:

If I sound irritable, ungrateful, part of it is because underneath is re-gret. All the little things I didnt do or did wrong. . . . Taught me a les-son I should have known all along. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.

God Help the Child succeeds in em-bracing the philosophical, the political, and the metaphysical without sacri-cing momentum. The brief novel is densely plotted, andcurious about the secrets that these men and women hesitate or refuse to disclosewe read on to nd out what happens and how these hidden traumas will come to light.

The plot includes a series of revela-tions and surprises, nearly all of which involve a case or an allegation of child abuse. As a girl, Bride was the star wit-ness at a trial that resulted in a teacher named Soa Huxley being sentenced to twenty-ve years to life in prison for molesting her students. Years later, after Brides lover Booker deserts her, she takes to the road to track him down, and nds refuge with a kindly couple of hippie survivalists who have rescued a little girl called Rain from a life of hell-ish exploitation on the streets. Brides best friend Brooklyn has chosen to tell no one about the childhood suf-fering that has left her with a quasi- clairvoyant intuition for what people want and how to please them.

The account of Bookers early home lifeinitially much happier and more secure than the gothic childhoods of the novels girls and womenis one of the loveliest and most relaxed sections in the book:

Every Saturday morning, rst thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their chil-dren requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have? . . . Booker loved those Saturday morning con-ferences rewarded by the highlight of the weekendhis mothers huge breakfast feasts. Banquets, really. Hot biscuits, short and aky; grits, snow-white and tongue-burning hot; eggs beaten into pale saffron creaminess; sizzling sausage pat-ties, sliced tomatoes, strawberry jam, freshly squeezed orange juice, cold milk in Mason jars.

But nally Booker too turns out to have had a youthful brush with tragedy

Toni Morrison, Princeton, New Jersey, 1992

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12 The New York Review

that has deeply affected his response to the world and hurtled him away from the rip and wave of life.

After the rst few chapters we may begin to realize that God Help the Child is not so unlike Morrisons pre-vious novels as its setting and surface might lead us to conclude. Quite a few of her books have featured an injuri-ous familial relationship. Sweetnesss rejection of Lula Ann is less appalling than the violence that Sethe inicts on her daughter in Beloved, or the death of Plum, burned alive by his mother in Sula. Many of these murders and desertions are, Morrison suggests, re-sponses to the evils of slavery and to the pressures of raising a family in a racist societypressures so destabiliz-ing that a woman may feel that the only way to safeguard her child is to kill it, or at least kill its spirit. As Sweetness says, I may have done some hurtful things to my only child because I had to protect her. Had to. All because of skin privileges.

Indeed, a number of recurrent themes connect this book to its predecessors: the inuence that racism, class, culture, and history exert over every large and small interaction; the ease with which sex can rearrange ones plans; the in-eradicable loneliness that is among the most painful and valuable components of the self; the effects of belonging to, or feeling exiled from, a community. In this novel, as in Sula, Morrisons frank-ness about the way in which competi-tion over a man can undermine a close female friendship is typical of her will-ingness to let observation override the idealized and the politically correct. And the romance between Bride and Bookerthe magnetism of their at-traction, the differences in their back-groundsrecalls the affair between Jadine Childs, a fashion model, and the rootless Son in Tar Baby.

The vein of magical realism that has run through Morrisons workin Be-loved, an angry ghost wreaks havoc in a Cincinnati home; in Song of Solomon, a laborer rises out of the cotton elds and ies through the airsurfaces here in the somatic changes that threaten to turn the voluptuous, condent Bride back into the unloved, undernourished Lula Ann, a crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl. First Brides body hair disappears, fol-lowed by the holes in her pierced ears. She loses weight, stops menstruating, and her breasts vanish, leaving only nipples:

No one had noticed or commented on the changes in her body, how at the T-shirt hung on her chest, the unpierced earlobes. Only she knew about unshaved but absent armpit and pubic hair. So all of this might be a hallucination, like the vivid dreams she was having when she managed to fall asleep. Or were they?

After one such dream, an erotic fantasy about Booker, Bride understands that the body changes began not simply after he left, but because he left.

Oddly, we may have less trouble accepting these occult occurrences than we do in believing some of the books more realistic moments. Hav-ing learned that Soa Huxley is about to be released, Brideunlike the other

prosecution witnesses who may be dis-mayed and even frightened to learn that the person they helped convict is getting outfollows her from the prison to a motel, knocks on the door, and introduces herself. Certain that Soa will be glad to receive some-thing friendly without strings, Bride presents her with a sort of swag bag full of goodies chosen to ease her transition from incarceration to freedom:

Id been planning this trip for a year, choosing carefully what a parolee would need: I saved up ve thousand dollars in cash over the years, and bought a three- thousand-dollar Continental Air-lines certicate. I put a promo-tional box of YOU, GIRL into a brand-new Louis Vuitton shop-ping bag, all of which could take her anywhere. Comfort her, any-way; help her forget and take the edge off bad luck, hopelessness and boredom.

Predictably, Soa fails to appreci-ate this gesture of goodwill, and beats Bride so severely that her battered face requires reconstructive surgery from which she does not recover for many months. Readers may well wonder: Has Bridewho may be self-involved and shallow but is by no means stupid or entirely insensitivereally imagined that Soa would be grateful for her gift, especially in view of the fact that Soa was imprisoned partly because of Brides testimony? Did it not occur to this savvy businesswoman that the terms of Soas parole might preclude her using the airline travel certicate at any time in the near future? Are we to conclude that our heroines moral com-pass and common sense have been set so thoroughly askew by her bad treat-ment as a child and then immersion in capitalist beauty culture? Is a predi-lection for stubborn self-justication one of the traits she has inherited or learned from Sweetness?

Not only does Bride fail to under-stand why her friendly overture is re-jected, but she blames and resents Soa for her ingratitude:

The bitch didnt even hear me out. I wasnt the only witness, the only one who turned Soa Huxley into 0071140. There was lots of other testimony about her molesta-tions. . . . Even Soa Huxley, of all people, erased me. A convict. A convict! She could have said, No thanks, or even Get out! No. She went postal. Maybe stght-ing is prison talk. Instead of words, broken bones and drawing blood is inmate conversation.

A similarly puzzling moment comes later in the novel, when Brides search for Booker leads her to the home of his aunt, a warmhearted and mater-nal woman named Queen, who shows Bride some pages on which Booker has jotted down what appear to be random musings:

Hey girl whats inside your curly head besides dark rooms with dark men dancing too close to comfort the mouth hungry for more of what it is sure is there somewhere out there waiting for a tongue and some breath to stroke teeth that bite the night and swallow whole

The explorers who transformed what America eats

The highs and lows of ballet and Broadway

The governor who might be the next president

The young men, the families, and the reality behind the face masks

The global challenges to privacy

University Press of Florida800-226-3822 www.upf.com

An American treasure

DISCOVER

A courageous feat of protest... or a sad act of madness?

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the world denied you so get rid of those smokey dreams and lie on the beach in my arms while I cover you with white sands from shores you have never seen lapped by wa-ters so crystal and blue they make you shed tears of bliss and let you know that you do belong nally to the planet you were born on and can now join the out-there world in the deep peace of a cello.

After reading this paragraph, a woman of Brides sophistication might reasonably decide that perhaps the breakup might not have been such a bad idea. Yet Bride is enchanted by what she feels she has learned from him:

Bride shook her head. She had counted on her looks for so longhow well beauty worked. She had not known its shallowness or her own cowardicethe vital lesson Sweetness taught and nailed to her spine to curve it.

Equally vexing is the question of why it takes the intelligent, perceptive Bookera reader of Walter Benjamin, Frederick Douglass, Melville, Dickens, and Robert Hassso long to gure out Brides closely guarded secret about the falseness of her testimony against Soa, something that we will likely have intuited early on in the novel. In the nal chapters, Booker learns what really occurred when Bride was a child. But by then we may be wondering how we could have spent so much time in Brides company without suspecting the truth about her experience. Its one thing to withhold information from the reader, but quite another to feel that a character is withholding information from herself.

Admittedly, repression can cause one to forget the past, but thats not what seems to be happening here. And this sacrice of plausibility in order to arrange a climactic, expiatory con-fession weakens the novel, much as Crime and Punishment would have been weakened had Dostoevsky de-layed revealing, until the end, the fact that Raskolnikov had murdered two old women. Toni Morrisons great tal-ent and her passion for her subjectthe mistreatment of children, and the heroic effort required to transcend the residual damage of abusewould have sufced to propel us through these pages without the artice that makes Bride more of a construct than a fully realized character.

One reason why we may have less trouble accepting the magical elements in the book than some of the more ap-parently naturalistic ones is that we have learned to suspend our disbelief in the presence of something that, we feel, could never occur. But when we are shown real people interacting in what we assume to be the real world, the writerregardless of the authority of her narrative voice, or of her pro-digious ability to will characters and events onto the pageis obliged to persuade us that a person might think and behave in the ways we observe her reecting and acting.

If Bride remains to some extent opaque, its at least partly becauseespecially in the more poetic pas-sageswe have trouble visualizing

and understanding what exactly she is seeing and telling us. In pain, follow-ing an automobile accident, she notes that the piece of sky she could glimpse was a dark carpet of knives pointed at her and aching to be released. And its hard to know what to make of either the language or the logic of this description of a rustic landscape:

A city girl is quickly weary of the cardboard boredom of tiny rural towns. Whatever the weather, iron-bright sunshine or piercing rain, the impression of worn boxes hiding shiftless residents seems to sap the most attentive gaze. . . . Bride wasnt feeling superior to the line of tiny, melancholy houses and mobile homes on each side of the road, just puzzled.

What exactly is cardboard boredom? Does one feel superior to houses or to the residents of those houses? And if Bride isnt feeling superior to these country folk, why does she describe them as shiftless?

Does the heady atmosphere of the mythic free the writer from having to pay attention to the details that, if got-ten wrong, can distract the reader and briey cast us out of the novel? We can only try to imagine why little Rain, who has grown up on the city streets, should be so mystied by the sight of a black woman. Or why, when Brides secret nally emerges, no onenot Bride, or Booker, or Queenso much as considers informing the authorities, so that restitution (ideally including some form of nancial compensation) could be made.

In view of the scope and the gravity of Morrisons themes and ambitions, why should such points matter? They do, because plausibility depends on the writers punctiliousness about just such details as these.

Ultimately, God Help the Child had the effect of making me want to go back to Toni Morrisons earlier novels, among them Sula and Song of Solomon, which remain my favor-ites. These are wonderful books in which we are convinced by the natu-ralistic no less than the fantastic. They owe their power to the pure force of storytelling and the effect of precise and transparent language. We continue to reread them because they work on multiple levels and be-cause we admire and believe every word.

Ian Williams is the best thing to happen to medicine since penicillin.

Alison Bechdel, 2014 MacArthur Fellow

224 pages | $24.95 paper Graphic Medicine Series

PENN STATE PRESSwww.psupress.org

1.800.326.9180

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14 The New York Review

Einstein as a Jew and a PhilosopherFreeman Dyson

Einstein: His Space and Timesby Steven Gimbel. Yale University Press, 191 pp., $25.00

Why would anybody want to write another book about Albert Einstein? Why would anybody want to read it? These are two separate questions, but both of them have satisfactory answers. In spite of the large number of books already written about Einstein, there is still room for one more.

There were several good reasons for writing this book. Yale Univer-sity Press is publishing a big series of short biographies under the heading Jewish Lives. Among the twenty al-ready published are Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Rothko, and Leon Trotsky. Among the twenty-ve announced as forth coming are Benjamin Disraeli, Bob Dylan, Jesus, and Moses. Einstein obviously belongs on this list.

John Reed in his eyewitness report, Ten Days That Shook the World, de-scribing the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, proclaimed Leon Trotsky to be the greatest Jew since Jesus. Over the last hundred years, Einstein has displaced Trotsky as the second-brightest star of the Jewish pan-theon. It would be absurd to display a gallery of famous Jews without putting Einstein in a prominent place. Another reason this Einstein book is welcome is that it is short. Most of the earlier books are much longer, with detailed and lengthy accounts of Einsteins personal life and scientic thinking. The time is now ripe for a short book, summarizing briey the well-known facts about Ein-steins rocky road as a husband and fa-ther and scientist, and emphasizing his lasting importance as a politician and a philosopher. This book is accurate and well balanced. It presents Einsteins Jewish heritage as he saw it himself, not as the core of his being, but as a his-torical accident bringing inescapable responsibilities.

The reasons for reading this book are also simple. The majority of famous scientists have books written about them that are of interest to historians and spe-cialists. The scientists remain famous for a few decades and then gradually fade. The books contain almost all the infor-mation about them that is worth preserv-ing. But there are a few scientists whose lives and thoughts are of perennial inter-est, because they permanently changed our way of thinking. To the few belong Galileo and Newton and Darwin, and now Einstein. For the select few, there will be no end to the writing of books. New books will need to be written and read, because these people had enduring ideas that throw light on new problems as the centuries go by.

The later chapters of Steven Gim-bels book describe Einsteins deep in-volvement with the Zionist movement, promoting the settlement of Jews in Palestine. Einstein saw these settle-ments as a benet both to Jews and to Arabs, giving Jews a place to live and prosper, and giving Arabs a chance to share the blessings of progress and prosperity. In 1929, when some Pales-tinian Arabs organized a violent oppo-sition to Jewish settlement and killed

some Jews, the British colonial govern-ment suppressed the rebellion and en-forced a peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs. But Einstein understood that this enforced coexistence could not last. He wrote an article with the title Jew and Arab from which Gim-bel quotes:

The rst and most important ne-cessity is the creation of a modus vivendi with the Arab people. Friction is perhaps inevitable, but its evil consequences must be over-come by organized cooperation, so that the inammable material may not be piled up to the point of danger. The absence of contact in every-day life is bound to pro-duce an atmosphere of mutual fear and distrust, which is favorable to such lamentable outbursts of pas-sion as we have witnessed. We Jews must show above all that our own history of suffering has given us sufcient understanding and psy-chological insight to know how to cope with this problem of psychol-ogy and organization: the more so as no irreconcilable differences stand in the way of peace between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Let us therefore above all be on our guard against blind chauvinism of any kind, and let us not imagine that reason and common-sense can be replaced with British bayonets.

Einstein worked with Chaim Weiz-mann, the leader of the Zionist or-ganization, to raise money for the settlements and for the foundation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But while he worked with Weizmann as a fund-raiser, he disagreed funda-mentally with Weizmanns aims for the future. In the early days, before Israel existed, Einstein was opposed to the idea of a Jewish state. Weizmann aimed from the beginning to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, and he lived long enough to see his dreams come true, serving as the rst president of the State of Israel. After the State of Israel was established, Einstein gave it his full support. But he said that a peaceful and permanent presence of Jews in Palestine could only be possible if they worked side by side with Arabs under conditions of social and political equality.

Einstein felt a deep personal respon-sibility for the actions of the Jewish community to which he never whole-heartedly belonged. He tried with all his strength to stop the Jewish people from becoming another nationalistic culture glorifying military strength, like the militaristic German culture that he had hated as a child and repudi-ated as a teenager when he renounced his German citizenship. He continued to support Israel while severely criticiz-

ing it. At the end of his life, when he had become an American citizen, he felt an equally deep responsibility for the actions of the American commu-nity to which he never wholeheartedly belonged. He had gone through the rit-ual of naturalization, but he remained an alien spirit in America.

He saw the American people, after their victory over Germany and Japan, sliding into the same militaristic arro-gance that overcame the German peo-ple after their victory over France in 1871. He had experienced in Berlin in 1914 the insane enthusiasm with which the German people, including his sci-entist friends and colleagues, welcomed the outbreak of World War I. He saw the same insanity taking root in Amer-ica, with patriotic citizens imagining that the possession of nuclear weapons would give America the power to rule the world. Just as he spoke out against the militarization of Israel, he spoke out against the militarization of Amer-ica. He spoke with particular clarity against the delusion that staying ahead in the race to develop nuclear weapons could give America a permanent na-tional security.

Gimbel quotes an excerpt from Ein-steins statement reacting to President Trumans announcement in 1950 that the United States was developing a hy-drogen bomb:

The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, ini-tiated originally as a preventive measure, assumes hysterical pro-portions. On both sides, means of mass destruction are being perfected with feverish haste and behind walls of secrecy. And now the public has been advised that the production of the hydrogen bomb is the new goal which will probably be accomplished. An ac-celerated development toward this end has been solemnly proclaimed by the President. If these efforts should prove successful, radioac-tive poisoning of the atmosphere and, hence, annihilation of all life on earth will have been brought within the range of what is techni-cally possible. The weird aspect of this development lies in its appar-ently inexorable character. Each step appears as the inevitable con-sequence of the one that went be-fore. And at the end, looming ever clearer, lies general annihilation.

These words have had a lasting im-pact. Many world leaders, civilian and military, have made similar statements during the subsequent sixty years. More importantly, the governments of powerful countries have behaved cau-tiously, showing by their actions that they do not consider victory in a major war to be a meaningful objective. Wars continue to be fought, but they are mostly local in scale and extended in time, as different as possible from a nuclear holocaust that could destroy half the world in a few hours. Military leaders in all countries have learned that nuclear weapons are not very use-ful. They are effective for murdering huge numbers of people in a short time, but not for winning real battles in real

Albert Einstein, Vienna, 1921

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